A new documentary by the BBC World Service has revealed Lancôme and Aerin Beauty used jasmine in their best-selling perfumes that was picked by minors on Egyptian farms.
The luxury brands, owned by L’Oréal (Lancôme) and Estée Lauder (Aerin Beauty), claim to have a zero tolerance policy on child labour.
BBC Eye Investigations discovered that the auditing systems the perfume industry uses to check on supply chains are deeply flawed.
Lawyer Sarah Dadush, founder of the Responsible Contracting Project, told the BBC that the systems aren’t working.
“The auditors are only auditing what they’re paid to audit, and this might not include the price paid to the labour force – ‘a major root cause’ of child labour,” she said.
Undercover filming in Egyptian jasmine fields, during last summer’s picking season, captured children as young as five waking at 3am to collect the flowers before the sun’s heat damaged them.
In the documentary, local woman Heba, who lives in a village in the district of Gharbia, said she needs her four children – aged between 5 to 15 – to help her, because the more she and her children pick, the more they earn.
On the night she was filmed, Heba and her children picked 1.5kg of jasmine flowers. After paying a third of her earnings to the land owner, she was left with roughly US$1.50 (AU$2.27), which is worth less than ever before due to Egypt’s all-time high inflation.
The media outlet reportedly witnessed a significant number of pickers under the age of 15 at four different locations, working on smallholder farms that supply the main factories – which then extract oil from the flowers and also set the prices for the pickers.
It is illegal for anyone under the age of 15 to work in Egypt between the hours of 7pm and 7am.
Independent perfumer Christophe Laudamiel told the BBC that it is the perfume companies – known as “the masters” – who hold all the power.
“The masters’ interest is to have the cheapest oil possible to put in the fragrance bottle,” said Laudamiel.
“They actually don’t govern the salary or the wages of the harvesters, nor the actual price of jasmine, because they are beyond that.”
He added that because of their budgets, the pressure on wages “trickles down” to the factories, which then ultimately affects the pickers.
“There’s a big disconnect between the preciousness that is talked about in the marketing talk, and what is actually given to the harvesters.”
Givaudan, the fragrance house which makes Lancôme’s Idôle L’Intense, called the investigation “deeply alarming”, while Firmenich, which makes Ikat Jasmine and Limone Di Sicilia for Aerin Beauty, said it was now using a new supplier in Egypt.
L’Oréal told the BBC that it was “actively committed to respecting the most protective internationally recognised human rights standards”, adding that it “never requests fragrance houses to go lower than the market price for ingredients at the expense of farmers.”
